My dog and I met when I was doing relief work after last year's tornadoes in southwest VA and northeast Tennessee.

We'd gone into Glade Spring to start clearing parts of people's houses out of the road and look for people who were missing, and I go into this halfway flattened house and there's a mattress over the bathtub. Two walls are gone, but the mattress is still on top of the bathtub. That's one of the things they tell you to do in tornadoes: get in the tub and put your mattress over you. So I'm freaking out because I'm pretty sure there's a person under there who's suffocated by now. But when I flip the mattress over, there's this dog.

God, I'm getting teary. It was a female, and maybe seven or eight months old. Her tail's broken clean off to about two inches from her butt, and she's in pain and dehydrated, but she's this beautiful espresso-and-white thing that might be some kind of awkward ugly border collie/pit bull mix with freckles on her nose, and I took her out of the bathtub and cleaned her up and she is so perfect and we've been together ever since. Her name's Robin now. She's crazy and barky and thinks wind is the devil, but she is a GOOD DOG.

The people who lived in that house died. But they put their dog in the bathtub because, presumably, they loved her as much as I do.

@districter Goodness, what? I just got back from voting in Arlington and it took all of half an hour tops. Then again, we had truly enormous early voting numbers, so there's that. I hope your friend gets to vote!

@olivebee Haha, there are a million places in New Orleans that are called things that look like they ought to be French, but somehow aren't pronounced like French but also aren't pronounced how they look in English. It's like a secret code!

@Beatrix Kiddo There are so many useful sounds that aren't represented in the English alphabet (but clearly should be)! Like that zh sound in measure and all of the French things ever, and that sound that's between y and w but definitely isn't represented by either, and the Arabic 'q' which is more like a really delicate kg thing? We clearly need more letters.